The main issue I have with defending my empire is the micromanagement problem that I often cannot use the game-created ship designs because they always use only "BestDefense" what is not adequate if an enemy attacks with weapons that don't match BestDefense. So I would like to see also designs with "BestArmour", "BestShield" and "BestPointDefense" so that I can choose what I like to build without always going into the ship designer, and that for every new tech level, because custom designs are not updated automatically.

At least give modders the ablility to create new blueprints with "BestArmour", "BestShield" and "BestPointDefense" if you don't want to change the game itself.

I tried the UCP_Combat mod for several hours now. While it looks quite promising (not played far enough to form a final opinion yet) I have a problem: There are new ship components like Fusion Accelerator that are not displayed in the Ship Designer, and when I try to alter or create a design and add one of these new components the game crashes.

Upon investigation I found that the graphics for those components are in UCP_Core. But adding UCP_Core as second mod makes the game crash on loading. If I only take the GFX folder out of UCP_Core and copy it into UCP_Combat nothing changes, the components are still invisible and cannot be put into a design without crashing.

In the debug.err I see error messages like this:

Debug Message: CShipDesignSystem::AddComponentToObjGfxConfig: FAILED to get attached components from PlaceComponentOnShipDebug Message: PlaceComponentOnShip FAILED because the object gfx config: .objgfxcfg was not found

I assume that has something to do with the problem. I found .objgfxcfg files for all ship compontents and other stuff in the game directory in the Designs folder, but have no idea what to do now. I already made a mod myself with new improvements that have new graphics. For that to work I only had to put the graphics in my mod folder under Gfx\Improvements and it worked (at least pre-Retribution, haven't used the mod with Retribution installed yet), no need to care for obscure .objgfxcfg files that seem to be zip files with two empty folders ...

Its not designed for Retribution, but, from what I see in the Retribution files, all the new blueprints Append ShipBlueprintDefs.xml (EXP4_ShipBlueprintDefs) so there should not be an issue of missing blueprints.